Ask HN: Examples of software where the new version is worse than the old?
6 pointsby calflegal13 hours ago12 comments
  • PaulHoule12 hours ago
    iOS 26.

    I can’t get over how ugly it looks. I guess it’s supposed to be transparent but often it just looks greyed out and edges of things look like they anti-aliased the images, took the residual, and sharpened the aliases just to make everything be surrounded by a distracting halo.

    I appreciate the idea of having multiple windows on iPad (Win 8 had that how long ago?) but I was playing Arknights and the main UI trope in Arknights is you drag and drop your ‘operators’ from the edge onto the playing field and when I do that the whole window comes loose so I disabled that feature.

  • linguae11 hours ago
    Many users of Microsoft Word 5.1 for Macintosh hated Microsoft Word 6; they felt the latter was not Mac-like. I was a kid during this time and the only Mac word processor I used in the classic era was the one included with ClarisWorks, so I don’t have any opinions about Word 5.1 vs 6.

    I feel Mac OS X peaked with Snow Leopard, though it wasn’t until Catalina when I started refusing to upgrade my personal Macs, which remained at Mojave until I retired them from daily driving.

    I also remember SimCity (the successor to SimCity 4) and SimCity Societies not being well-received. Sadly the SimCity franchise is dead; I enjoyed SimCity 2000 and 4 (I never played 3000).

    The fourth generation of Pokémon games, in my opinion, was the high water mark of the franchise’s main series games, peaking at Heart Gold/Soul Silver.

  • roscas11 hours ago
    I remember one of the worst programs ever was from SAGE and it was called "Linha50". Originaly for MS-DOS, they converted it to Windows. The wait for a key on each field pushed the cpu to 100% because it was checking if there was any key being pressed.

    Result, when "idle", the cpu was at 100%. Just imagine this.

  • wolrah13 hours ago
    Photoshop after somewhere between maybe 5 and CS2?

    Office after maybe 2000?

    CentOS after 8

    • maxwell13 hours ago
      Yeah CS2 was the peak to me, I started using it again maybe a year ago instead of their recent slop. Works even better with modern processors, back in the mid '00s it seemed to lag on everything but the first Mac Pro. And Adobe publicly published serial numbers when they shut down the activation servers, if you can get your hands on a copy of the install discs.
  • jll2912 hours ago
    Hardware: Lenovo ThinkStation <-- IBM PC AKA IBM 5150

    Software: OmniGraffle 7 <-- OmniGraffle 6

    Book: SICP (I like the 2nd edition best, now the latest based on Python is an aesthetic crime IMHO.)

    For software, many programs reach the bloat status, of course there is the old joke about any system growing until it can send email (or having its own embedded LISP variant ;-).

  • pulvinar11 hours ago
    On the Mac, Final Cut Pro 7 to X was infamous.

    And Aperture 3.6 to anything recommended to replace it.

  • al_borland8 hours ago
    Winamp 2.9 was peak. They tried v3 and v5, but neither was loved like v2.
  • jleyank12 hours ago
    Looking at the comments, might it be easier to list software with a track record of general improvement?
  • torunar10 hours ago
    Guitar Pro went downhill after version 5.
  • _wire_12 hours ago
    Every release of iTunes since SoundJamMP
  • NetworkPerson13 hours ago
    Windows
    • PaulHoule12 hours ago
      Goes back and forth. People hated Vista and 8 and liked 7 and 10.
      • roscas11 hours ago
        People get influenced by "reviewers". Windows 8 was great considering it was the first to try the table mode. I remeber the amount of pages and youtubers that tried to put 8 down.

        But Windows 10 just went down the drain. In all possible ways. It still does today with Windows 10+1.

        But Windows ME and XP 64 bits were just unusable. Vista was kinda wrong move because load all the crap at boot was a terrible idea.

        But Micro$oft software, we should list a few good products because there are far more bad ones than good.

        Good? Some games, DirectX, Visual Studios, .net. More bad? Almost everything else.

        Still worst Micro$oft program ever: explorer.exe. Period.

        • PaulHoule10 hours ago
          Personally I liked 8.

          I thought a tablet + bluetooth mouse + bluetooth keyboard + cheap plastic clip - trackpad made a great laptop but I think I was the only one if you don't count Balmer and Sinofsky.

          I don't know if synaptics had some patent they used to force everybody in the industry to make laptops with trackpads [1] or if the flight attendant's union got too confused about whether you can stow a 2-in-1 in the pocket in front of your seat, but it just didn't fly with most people.

          [1] in cases where you couldn't use the mouse fall back to tablet mode

  • ThomasGuy12 hours ago
    [dead]